Slugfest db-4 Page 17

  “You’ve got company.”

  Forty-seven

  Was the other cop here—Stancik’s partner?

  “Are you okay?” I kept my voice down. J. C. glanced in the direction of her weapon of choice. She was either signaling for me to reach for it or indicating she hadn’t needed it. Dang if I could tell which it was; I didn’t know her well enough. I took a tentative step into her apartment and peered to the right. On the sheltered part of her terrace, inspecting her plants, was Jamal Harrington. He was with a girl. All I knew about her was that she wore no makeup, wore a brown corduroy jacket, and wasn’t Cindy Gustafson. I closed the door behind me quickly, as if John Stancik might have followed me up the stairs.

  “What the heck are they doing here?”

  J. C. shrugged. “Some idiot must have buzzed them in.”

  They’d been waiting for me on the upstairs landing when J. C. got home from yoga class. She’d threatened to call the cops—by now she probably had them on speed dial—and not even the presence of a fresh-faced twenty-five-year-old girl would satisfy her that they were not up to no good. She’d read the news—that was how confidence teams worked. One looked innocent and softened your defenses, then the other beat you to a pulp and took your stuff. It was only Jamal’s detailed description of his winning garden exhibit that kept her from swinging her trusty iron bar and braining him on the spot.

  “Just because you can tell a gloxinia from a Glock, I’m supposed to believe you’re not thieves or psychos? I’m drawing a blank at present, but haven’t some legendary villains had innocuous hobbies?”

  “I don’t know any legendary villains,” the boy had said. “You mean like Al Pacino in Scarface?”

  J. C. was still poised to strike, if necessary. But Moochie had seemed fond of the boy, and the cat was usually a good judge of character.

  “I’m in trouble and Ms. Holliday was kind to me last night,” Jamal had said. “I have no other place to go.”

  With that, J. C. had invited them in.

  Jamal and Not-Cindy halted their garden tour and turned toward the front door when they heard our voices. From a certain angle Jamal could be seen from the street where John Stancik might be lingering, so I motioned for him to come in. He ran toward me and grabbed both my hands as if his savior had arrived. The girl was less effusive.

  He straightened up and regained some of his tough-guy demeanor. “Ms. Holliday, Ms. Peete said I was wrong about you. She said you’d help.” The boy was polite if nothing else.

  “Stay off the terrace for one thing. I just got a police escort home, and my chauffeur may still be outside. I told him I’d probably never see you again, so he wouldn’t be too happy with me if he saw you on the terrace. Just for curiosity’s sake, how did you find me?”

  “Followed you when you left the store yesterday. Then I saw the pilgrims and turkeys on the windows and knew which building and which floor you were on.”

  The girl said nothing, either getting a new set of lies straight or trying to remember the ones she’d told me over breakfast.

  “I don’t think I know your friend,” I said.

  Jamal introduced Not-Cindy as Emma Franklin, the late Garland Bleimeister’s girlfriend. At least that was the current story.

  “Everything I told you was true,” Jamal said, “except I left Emma’s name out of it because she asked me not to tell anyone. Because of what happened to Garland. She was afraid.”

  The girl picked up her cue. “And everything I said was true. Except for the honey stuff. All I know about honey is that you press the bear’s tummy and the honey comes out of the top of its head.”

  It was a disarming statement. The girl exuded innocence, sweet stuff gushing out of her mouth as if someone had pressed the right spot on her tummy. But she had the ability to get people to lie for her and protect her—including me—and that was a dangerous quality. I wouldn’t be doing it again.

  “Garland did go to Penn State a few years back, but he never got his degree.”

  So far, Emma’s definitions of everything and true left much to be desired. I waited to hear the other exceptions.

  Not sure that Jamal would show up, Garland had also asked her to retrieve his bag. Without the need for subterfuge or the late-night transfer of alcoholic beverages, Emma had come to the aid of a woman struggling with two cumbersome display cases and a temperamental wheelie cart. The two of them simply waltzed in together—Emma and a beekeeper named Cindy Gustafson.

  “I’m pretty strong. She was nice. She gave me some honey for helping her.”

  Emma took a large, heavy glass jar out of her bag and I recognized it from the three I’d purchased at the real Cindy Gustafson’s booth. Hers was not wrapped. So you decided to temporarily steal the nice lady’s identity. Charming. Did you steal the honey, too? Or did you whack your boyfriend on the head with it? The jar was roughly the shape and size of a small brick with some detailed ridges near the lid. I found myself wondering if there was evidence on it.

  The girl offered the honey to J. C., who placed it on the butcher-block table. She perched on a counter stool nearby and we waited for the girl to continue.

  “Once I didn’t have the boxes against my chest, one of the guards saw I didn’t have a badge and asked me to leave.”

  “You were wearing one this morning,” I said.

  She shook her head and fished around in her bag again, pulling out an empty badge holder she’d picked up near the registration desk and stuffed with a piece of paper she’d written on. She tossed it on the coffee table. It wouldn’t have fooled Rolanda, but would work on a less diligent security guard or a part-timer who wasn’t paying attention, and it had worked on me. If this kid didn’t watch it, she could turn into a first-class con woman. But why did she do it?

  “Why not just tell me who you are and what you wanted?”

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I was afraid. I haven’t slept in a real bed for two nights. Garland had the only keys to the apartment where we’d been crashing. Then we had to leave. He had my passport. We were going away. Now I don’t know who has it. And whether or not they think I know something.”

  Who were they? And what was there to know?

  “Just spit it out, dear.” J. C. would have made a good interrogator. Or therapist. There was something soothing in the way she drew the girl out. Motherly—now that she’d put that bar down. Or maybe it was the way she now held the jar of honey, which, if it was evidence, was being thoroughly contaminated. It would have seemed strange for me to tell her to put it down, so I asked her to put the water on for tea. She was surprised but put the jar down and did as I asked.

  “C’mon, Emma.”

  “Garland needed money. He started playing cards in his junior year, thinking he could cover his college loans that way. He was good at it. He was also good at spending it. He loved hosting parties with fabulous food and going to four-star restaurants. He was such a steady customer at some restaurants, they let him run up huge tabs. He lived so large they must have thought he was a trust-fund kid and if he didn’t pay, daddy would. So not true. His parents had no money.

  “Then he started losing. Big-time. The bets got larger as he got more desperate and tried to make it all back chasing one big payoff.”

  “But it didn’t happen,” I said.

  “He just dug himself into a deeper hole. Eventually he borrowed money from this greasy mob guy. The interest was astronomical, and the number just kept going up, even when Garland made payments. He was winning again but never enough to pay off the principal. I don’t even think they wanted that—they just wanted him to pay the interest forever.”

  Welcome to the world of finance—mob or otherwise.

  She explained that Garland’s less than realistic plan was to raise enough cash to get them to Macau, where he claimed to have friends. He was convinced he could win enough dough there to pay back the mobsters and come home with a new stake. And he was expecting someone at the Big Apple Flower Show to gi
ve him seed money. There were so many flaws in this strategy I didn’t know where to begin, but it was all moot now.

  “Macau? Couldn’t he go to Foxwoods or Vegas, like everyone else?”

  “The gamblers knew him at those places. He was afraid they’d know he was broke and get in touch with the people he owed. Besides, he said the food at those places was terrible.”

  Picky guy. Maybe I’d been too hard on her. Perhaps the tears at the bagel shop that morning had been real. J. C. handed her a box of tissues and got up to make the tea, taking the jar of honey with her.

  I wasn’t as patient as J. C. and asked the obvious question. “Okay, how does a college dropout with a gambling problem wind up at a flower show?”

  “I’m not sure. Garland took some agricultural classes at Penn State. He studied with this wacko professor, who was eventually booted off campus over some unauthorized experiments. Garland worked for him, too.”

  The girl picked up Moochie and began to mindlessly stroke his fur. “He said taking that job was going to turn out to be the smartest decision he ever made.” The cat wriggled out of her grip. Smart cat.

  I thought back to the names in the show directory. Bamb-ino and BioSafe probably had scientists on their payrolls, even if they weren’t listed in the company literature.

  “Were the experiments related to pest repellents? Who was Garland here to see?”

  The girl said she didn’t know.

  “You must know something. People don’t just hand out checks for nothing. Who was it? What did Garland have on them?”

  “He just said we’d get the money. He said he deserved it. He was entitled to it.”

  I listened to this young girl calmly describing her murdered boyfriend’s shake-down scheme and wondered when exactly her moral compass had gone blooey. He deserved it. I guessed whoever had killed the boy thought he deserved it, too. What crucial bit of information was she leaving out?

  “Garland said he’d wrap up his business on Wednesday night. He told me not to worry about the bag. If I couldn’t get it, a boy we’d met earlier in the day was going to get him into the convention center that night.” She motioned to Jamal, who seemed anxious to pick up his thread of the story to clear himself, if only to the assembled group.

  “So you and Garland went back to the center,” I said. “He left you to do his business and you had a snooze at the beach hut in Connie Anzalone’s exhibit and didn’t see or hear anything until something woke you—two people running out of the center?”

  The boy shook his head. “There were noises before that. Something else happened. One of the Wagner employees—maybe it was Otis—was pushing a large rubber tub or cart, like the cleaning staff uses. He was cursing about how heavy it was and why the hell had someone left it in the middle of the floor ’cause all the cleaning was supposed to be done by then. I didn’t think anything of it and stayed hidden because I didn’t want to get into trouble. I didn’t want to hurt our chances of winning.”

  Under the circumstances, not winning a flower show contest was the least of Jamal’s problems.

  “I waited for him to pass and only came out when the sound of the cart’s wheels and the man muttering was off in the distance. I didn’t see anyone. I checked on the exhibit and went back to the hut, but may have dozed off again. It was later on I heard the other noise and saw the two people.”

  “Except it wasn’t me,” the girl said. “I was waiting for Garland at the bar.”

  How much were these kids playing us and how much of what they were saying was true?

  I had the sinking feeling Garland’s body had—at least briefly—been in that tub, and that the man pushing it, Otis Randolph, had been killed when he discovered what was inside or how it got there. But by whom?

  Forty-eight

  “I’ll feel pretty stupid if I let you stay here tonight and wake up dead tomorrow morning.” Moochie may have been won over, but J. C. said out loud what she and I were both thinking.

  We were still actively trying to convince Jamal and Emma to turn themselves in to the police, but we weren’t heartless enough to send two hungry orphans out into a monsoon with no place to stay for the night. That said, we fell a little short of the complete kumbaya chip that would allow rational people to offer their floors or sofas to total strangers. Especially ones who might be involved in multiple murders.

  “We can sleep in the hallway,” Jamal said.

  “The Dons will freak,” J. C. said.

  Not mobsters or British professors, J. C. explained that the Dons were a gay couple, both named Don, who lived next door and returned from their house in the Hamptons early on Sunday mornings to beat the traffic. A couple of kids huddled in the hallway would send them straight for the telephones. One would call the cops and the other would call their real estate agent. Their apartment would go on the market and that would be unfortunate since they’d just completed a lengthy renovation and a new owner would only rip everything out and the building would once again be filled with dust and tarps and men with carpenter’s butt who frightened Moochie and Tommy.

  Jamal motioned to the terrace. “Out there’s okay. I can move the bench so that it’s in the sheltered part so that I can’t be seen from the street.” Without a word he had assumed it was his presence that was the issue, not Emma’s. If anything, I trusted her less than him.

  J. C. was not inclined to have anyone redecorating her terrace, even one who’d taken a blue ribbon at the Big Apple Flower Show, but she gave it some thought.

  “I will fill a coffee can with kitty litter. If you have to pee, you’re not going in my planters and you’re not going to go over the side of my terrace. That point is nonnegotiable.”

  Jamal nodded in agreement.

  “I may still have a tent from my hippie days. If I do, it’s in the storage room downstairs.”

  Some New York City apartment buildings have storage rooms in their basements that can be rented by the owners or tenants. They’re the graveyards for baby carriages, abandoned bicycles, and exercise equipment too expensive to toss but too guilt inducing to leave in the owners’ apartments. J. C. plucked a set of keys from a bowl on the counter.

  “C’mon.”

  Jamal was relieved. “That’s cool. I’ve never slept in a tent. I think it’s a white thing, wanting to sleep on the ground.” His comment cut the tension.

  That left Emma without a bed and all eyes were on me to offer her the sofa in Lucy’s apartment. Lucy didn’t have much that could instantly be turned into serious cash, although they’d do well on eBay. The shoes and handbags were expensive—and so plentiful I doubted Lucy would miss any, but it wasn’t my place to volunteer someone else’s home to a stranger. Particularly one who still had some explaining to do.

  J. C. bailed me out.

  “I’ve got bivvy bags. You can both use them.” Jamal and Emma looked at her as if she’d offered them Depends. “Short for bivouac?” Judging by their expressions bivouac must have sounded like a new drug for insomnia or acid reflux.

  “They’re sleeping sacks,” I said. “When you don’t need or don’t want to carry a tent.”

  “I knew I liked you,” J. C. said. “The girl who lives upstairs, your friend—I bet she wouldn’t know a bivvy sack from a flour sack. C’mon, Jamal, you’ll have to help me hunt through my things.” She walked to the door and picked up her iron bar. The boy seemed hurt that she thought she’d need to defend herself against him. I was a little surprised myself.

  “What?” she said, looking around the small apartment at the three people she was now conspiring with. “This?” She rattled her saber. “The gate in the storage room sticks. Sometimes it has to be pried up.”

  She gently pushed the boy ahead of her on the steps and I overheard them as they headed down to the storage room. “Let’s go, Jamal. I’ll tell you about the time Teddy Roosevelt and I went hunting in Alaska.”

  “For real?” he asked, looking back up at her.

  “No. Not for real.”<
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  They disappeared into the zigzag of the staircase. Emma had said she hadn’t eaten since the bagel I’d bought her that morning and I was hungry myself so I jogged down two flights of stairs to catch up with them and hung over the railing. “J. C., okay if we raid your fridge?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Climbing back up the stairs, I hoped for something that didn’t need to be reheated. “Emma?”

  I tapped on the bathroom door. No answer. I looked outside on the terrace but she wasn’t there either. Upstairs at Lucy’s the door was still locked. I unlocked it and searched the apartment. Puzzled, I went back to J. C.’s and waited for her and Jamal. After fifteen minutes they returned with their outdoor gear, laughing as if she was a den mother and he an overgrown Cub Scout.

  “Did you see Emma?” I asked, as they entered the apartment.

  They shook their heads. Jamal went straight for the terrace. J. C. and I followed. Had they discussed an escape strategy or was it the only logical explanation for her disappearance?

  The rain had let up a bit. Judging from the faint scrapes on the terrace’s painted floor, Emma had dragged the pot of Pieris over to the railing, stood on the pebbled mulch, and hoisted herself onto the fire escape ladder that dangled, extended over the front of the building. In the process she’d torn down one of J. C.’s lattices covered with clematis and Boston ivy.

  “She said she was strong.”

  “And athletic,” J. C. said, “but that is not a nice girl.”

  Standing on the terrace, we heard a soft knock that escalated into furious, impatient tapping on J. C.’s partially open door. We must have looked an odd trio to the newcomer, as we stood in the steady drizzle, J. C. with her ever-present iron bar which—now that I knew her better—seemed more like Little Bo Peep’s staff than a pugil stick; an inner-city kid holding two bivvy bags and a stack of tent poles as if he had no idea what they were used for; and me.